A price on the heads of poor students

Currently, the K-12 charter school is paying $300,000 a year to rent the previously vacant middle school building at Seventh Street and Fillmore. But Phoenix Elementary has notified the charter school that the rent will rocket to $2.7 million on July 1, 2019, when its five-year lease is up.

“They’re putting a price of the head of low-income students,” Bridget Eagy, the school’s PTO president, tells me. “I feel like we’ve been in this school for the last 10 years. We’ve been extremely successful in graduating 100 percent of our seniors. Now that the property values have gone up around us, they want to charge us for being successful. I feel like we helped contribute to the downtown culture of revitalization.”

The school district didn’t return a call for comment. But a statement on its website says state law requires it to get market value when leasing school property.

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“Given the sustainable rise of downtown Phoenix and value of the property at this time, as good stewards of taxpayer dollars, the governing board must move forward to seek market value,” the district said.

Meanwhile, ARS 15-1105 says school districts "shall charge a reasonable use fee for the lease of the school property."

Difficult to think of an 800 percent boost in rent as reasonable.

I can’t really fault Phoenix Elementary for wanting to raise as much money as it can to serve its students. Arizona’s public schools have been woefully underfunded by the state and it's only logical that district officials would want to squeeze as much rent as they possibly out of their vacant buildings.

However, in a state where education is the public’s No. 1 concern, it seems crazy to force out a non-profit Title I school that is actually performing well – or to expect that it can pay the same rent as a law firm or a bank.

About 1,200 students attend ASU Prep, with another 1,000 on the waiting list. About 80 percent of the students are minority and two-thirds qualify for the free or reduced lunch program. Eagy says three quarters of the students live within the boundaries of the Phoenix Elementary School District.

'Baffling,' 'drastic and avoidable'

ASU Prep, she says, has offered to boost its rental payments by 60 percent, to nearly $500,000 a year, but the school district has rejected the offer.

In late July, the school board terminated ASU Prep’s lease but extended the time for negotiations for another 60 days.

Surely, there is a middle ground that gives the school district a fair return without giving a successful inner city school the bum’s rush out of the area.

If there’s not, then state officials should step in and find a fair solution.

ASU Prep officials didn’t return a call for comment but in a statement released last week, the school called the rent demand "baffling" and the lease termination "drastic and avoidable."

“In 2009, the district invited us to design and run a quality high school on the site of a chronically underperforming former school,” said Beatriz Rendon, CEO of ASU Preparatory Academy. “We have more than delivered, proving that all students, regardless of background, can be successful throughout their entire K-12 careers. This school in downtown Phoenix has far exceeded the performance of schools around the state and country with similar demographics. ASU Prep Phoenix should be emulated, not closed.”

Eagy said there likely isn’t anyplace else in the downtown area that could accommodate the charter school, with its football and baseball fields.

“My hope is that they’ll come to their senses and see the value that ASU Prep is adding to the community,” she said. “We have a lot of families who depend on this school for a quality education for their children.”